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Monday, January 15, 2018

Food for thought - "We have everything from A to Z" (Netflix VS Amazon)

I have to admit, when I found out that Amazon started to get into cloud computing, I held my breath. Amazon's business model isn't really to sell books, it's real business motive (in my opinion) is to sell EVERYTHING. That is why the logo of Amazon (if you take a look at the arrow points from A to Z of the words Amazon and not any other letters). It's a symbolism representing "we have everything from A to Z". By them entering cloud computing, they were further solidifying their goal of selling EVERYTHING. This has been true so far and now you can virtually get everything and anything off Amazon (maybe except live animals and sketchy things).

This is from Amazon themselves, do you see what I mean? The "We sell everything from A to Z". Note: I don't own this logo and used under Creative Commons

Right now through AWS (Amazon Web Services) many websites are now hosted by Amazon through servers across the globe. For those unfamiliar with the concept, just imagine AWS like a virtual computer that acts as a way for people to store information (in particular websites, databases and etc...). I recalled a time in 2017 that AWS had a service outage and then all of a sudden, many websites also suddenly stopped working. I remember I was registering for a race using www.raceroster.com when this happened and Race Roster sent an email saying that they were hosted on AWS and that is why their website stopped working.

Amazon Prime Video on Android

A great example of why I think Amazon has a lot of growth potential and that others should be worried is the comparison between Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Netflix is pretty much a cloud based subscription based online video streaming service. Amazon Prime Video is the same, and both use the similar technology - where the video is hosted on their servers and customers sign up through a subscription to watch videos. When comparing the two side by side, there are major similarities and major differences. Beginning with the similarities, both services allow you to use multiple devices and download movies to your own devices. They both offer exclusive films (don't quote me on this but I find that if one film exists on Netflix, it won't exist on Amazon Prime Video).

Netflix interface on Android

However, difference wise, Amazon Prime Video offers their service at no additional cost if you are a Amazon Prime member. Personally, that is super sexy sounding to me as a consumer because for a year of Amazon Prime, it is much cheaper than Netflix and you also get more perks (like free photo/video storage via Amazon Prime Drive) and Amazon Music. So if we are strictly talking about price and what you get out of the price, Amazon Prime wins. Think about this: if you as a consumer is getting all of the benefits of Netflix at no additional cost, why wouldn't you want to switch over to Amazon Prime Video and save money?

That said, Netflix, although more expensive does have WAYYY more content that Amazon Prime Video. I find that Netflix originals such as Stranger Things, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Orange is the New Black are soooo good. Amazon also has originals but I find that they aren't as good as what Netflix has - for now. I can see that Amazon is gaining a bigger market share in online streaming but it might be a while until Amazon can establish the "supply chain" and distribution networks to be able to compete with Netflix (who have established their channels of how they get their info) .

In summary, at the current stage, comparing Amazon Prime and Netflix is like comparing apples and oranges because of the difference in content that they have. However, at the rate of growth of Amazon, I won't be surprised that down the road, Amazon Prime Video will soon be-able to have more content to rival Netflix. The more significant thing is that this is just an example of how Amazon is beginning to "take over the world". This is just a brief overview and example, but there are also many other examples - I will explore them in another blog post.

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